"Any restriction is unacceptable for me."

Magdalena Jetelová interviewed by Ulrike Ritter

The Semily-born artist Magdalena Jetelová lives since 1985 mainly in Germany and has developed and implemented numerous international art projects. Currently she is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Ulrike Ritter has interviewed her on the occassion of her exhibition "Abflug / Departure" in Augsburg H2 - Centre for Contemporary Art.

Important information about Jetelovás artwork is available on the website of the artist www.jetelova.com. The exhibition at the H2-Centre for Contemporary Art has already been discussed for ARTS-On.com: http://www.arts-on.com/magdalena_jetelova.html

Magdalena Jetelová photographed in her studio in Munich by Ulrike Ritter

Jetelová: Jetelová: So, political content was actually most legible in my projects with a red smoke signal in Prague. I set houses from the edge of town to my studio under red smoke signals, and used its effect. A complete world map was coloured with a red pen. Each artist reflects the environment in which he lives.

About the sculpture of the wooden chair: The size of the work was already a kind of irony about the monumentality of the former state representation.

Ritter: So the monumental gesture of your work was primarily what made the political approach.

Jetelová: Yes. And it is also important to say that we did not work in conformity with the former regime. Thus we did not have the usual means for our work. We were not able and we did not want to exhibit in the official institutions, but had built up our own scene. We exhibited our artwork in private premises, outdoors and in cities, where we found a temporary place until we were expelled. The Prague stations, for example, could not be closed, many people had to walk through daily. Thus, there we presented our art inside and around on the street. It was a similar method to the way you find today at the Berlin Biennale. It has become usual to conceptualize exhibitions as events or at least as supported by events. Exhibitions such as that in the Prague stations had something close to such an event for us, and it gave us great pleasure. In addition, the provocative gave us fun.

I was very much influenced by this way of working. These were no programs for gallery-fitting works in one meter times one meter formats. The complexity of the art did not allow such a restriction.

"Descent", 1979/1980, (c) http://www.jetelova.com

Ritter: One of the works done in 1979/1980, a monumental sculpture out of wood, is named "Descending chair". Is this an allusion to Marcel Duchamp's "act descending a staircase" (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art)?

Jetelová: Art is always a discourse with art. The term "descending" has such connotations. Jindrich Chalupecky in 1969 was the first to show in Prague's Spalova gallery artworks by Marcel Duchamp. This exhibition was for us at that time something very special. In conjunction with this exhibition, there was a group of artists strongly affected by Duchamp. The names are hardly known here, it's a problem, we do not have ...

Ritter: ... the same art history?

Jetelová: You can feel it today even with the artists from China, Mexico, Cuba. There is written a completely different art history.

Ritter: You can perhaps say that experience is received in the works?

Jetelová: It is not only experience but the manner of implementation.

Ritter: The monumental moments of your works, at least in your previous works until the pyramid, are they romantically distorted by irony ?

Jetelová: Irony is certainly an important aspect. Nevertheless, it's not just about irony, but other aspects and nuances are likewise of concern. Thus it is difficult to judge my works as monumental.

Ritter: I understand monumentalism in a way that is not easily refused for your works: weight, expensive materials, space expansion, not to be limited or based on a room - you can perhaps better talk of blasting.

Jetelová: Yes, the word fits. I am interested in methods and visual aspects which contradict each other. Whether this is irony or tension, contradiction, it is exactly what is now to be seen in the H2 - exhibition. An interesting aspect of the exhibition is that even if all the walls are offset to vibration levels, the applied texts stay rigidly and clearly legible. Physically the phenomenon is explainable, but for me it was primarily a visual discovery.

Ritter: But your work has a relation to science. "Iceland 2002" about the transatlantic shelf is almost analytical. You have had physical and geological conditions ahead of you, to inspect and artistically comment or implement them.

Jetelová: Just like the hopper chunks at the Atlantic coast, disappearing slowly in the water: Vanishing and passing committed by natural conditions, their temporal level.

Ritter: You make a lot of projects where everybody has to think: My goodness, how can anyone manage that, it is staged with excellence, to discover such a thing and to handle it like this, projecting something directly into the landscape - the complexity and effort of the projects are highly impressing. On the other hand, you actually draw attention to something more insecuring: as example in the project about the transatlantic shelf: The continents are the geological foundation. Any idea of the world or the Earth is based on it: There are those continents, Australia, Asia, Europe, America etc. and that is all well and has clear limits. And you indicate exactly what is still on the move.

Jetelová: Exactly this is the exciting moment, joining two completely different things. This has also been the approach in the project of the pyramid: An encounter between two different eras and architectures. The meeting shows the strangeness that is a little like my biography. .

Ritter: Are you likewise broken into the Bavarian-North Rhine-Westphalia world and the New York galleries ...?

Jetelová: Yes, meanwhile you can say the studio is everywhere. That was a shock for me at the beginning. Initially in Munich, I had a lot of difficulties to find a studio. Then I proceeded to England and the United States, other foreign countries, and that has worked reasonably well. Now I cope very well with it, and it was even in Prague so that I worked outdoors.

Ritter: Conceptually it all reminds me somewhat of the literature of the german romantic. You are very theortically oriented, even more so concerning media theories, but also in general. Have you looked into this literature of authors like Hölderlin?

Jetelová: No, with the exception that I was born at the Neckar, too..

Ritter: Then we go on with media theories. Arnold Gehlen or Marshall McLuhan, one of the first philosophers of media, conceived the media developments into space and media around us in general, that can help to open up spaces, actually as extensions of the body.

Jetelová: This is my opinion, too. I am not happy in a closed casket, being judged as a wood sculptor or media sculptor for once and ever.

Ritter: You cite Villem Flusser in the context of your project "De Wette Park", Basel 2000. There, you have put up sculptures in the form of letters in the park. The quote reads: "Our alphabets are codes through which speech is made visible: the individual letters are drawings that translate sounds in the spoken language into visual elements. Accordingly, we should really concentrate here on the concept of >reading< in the narrower sense. Yet if we did, we would fail to take account of the contemporary culture situation." How is this to be understood?

Jetelová: Signature and the word for me have no materiality. Different perspectives of imagination correspond with reality. Thus a situation arises that opens up new levels of perception. You can not head yourself in the sculptural scripture, you lose yourself, and feel the physicality of the written. What is written will not even be understood but taken as false information, even if it is from a different perspective readable. My intention was to let the physicality of the word be felt. To encrypt the message, is also an issue in the Atlantic project "On the battleground".

Ritter: There is indeed much theatricality of technologies visible, emphazised by your Virilio citation: "Absolute war becomes theatricality." This is again something different than the phenomenological, as the question whether language words are materially or substantially physical. But what would you say, what means theatricality of military and war technologies and behaviour for you exactly? Do you sense it as negative, positive, a perception experience - what should we do with it?

Jetelová: Virilio researched in his book "Archaeology of the bunker" scandalous properties.

In his texts you'll find the phrase "absolute war becomes reality". The Irony is in the shape of the hoppers, which remind now increasingly more of a puppet theater. Hoppers moved by the sea, this is really different to what they were built for.

Acceleration of time is Virilio's domain, the apparent standstill of time, but here in contrast all the unexpected movements of the previous power structures - the justice of time?

Not all image nuances can always be explained, someone might notice them, another one not. The interpretations often show only the thirstiness of their performers.

The simple truth: The bunkers are now powerless and almost wrong in the sea as powerless politics against violence.

I was interested in this daily change in reality, the disaster visible in slow motion and the agony of remembering.

Ritter: Since the nineties, there were projects such as songline 75 ° 36'52 "and iceland 1992 (the Atlantic shelf), projects with new media technologies, light, almost intangible things such as airlines, very costly, but in the materials very different from earlier projects...

Jetelová: Song Line means for the Aborigines a way that is visible in Dott Painting.

The juxtaposition of the imaginary geographical orders in the mysterious drawings of the Aborigines and the accuracy of contemporary technologies has fascinated me.

The coordinates of my project had global dimensions. This concerned, I kept everything along the lines of the Aborigines. Every detail had the dimensions and proportions of the whole and did always work as pars pro toto.

I set the first point of my "Dotpainting" in Melbourne, then every 600 meters another point, as such a trihedrale reflector on the roofs of houses and bridges that joined the exact geographical point line with the ways and lines of the Aborigines.

My canvas were the Earth and the urban space. The light from the reflectors, which also works through touch, the latest technology of satellite transmissions, I have used in the same way as the Aborigines use their fingers in the dottpaintings. My dott paintings were retured by the Corner reflectors and the DASA satelites to earth.

Ritter: Can you thus conceive these projects as specific use of military technologies or avant-garde technologies?

Jetelová: Why shouldn't these latest technologies be additionally used for artistic purposes? With military institution the situation is quite different. In England I addressed them, whether to work together on projects, but the response was unfortunately nearly zero.

Ritter: You know from media theories the idea that media are almost extensions of your own body. Along this conceptual alignment of the media's technical body with human bodies media theories get into depth psychology. Linked to that we find two views on the concept of subject-ness and subjectivity. I'll stage the withgoing concepts of being a subject in contrast: On one hand, there's the classical subject of an artist, who subordinates all and everything to his idea to get an entire project designed. On the other hand, you'll find a self-understanding, for example like in the writings of Jacques Derrida, who addresses him/herself to something preformed and given, to comment, analyse and perhaps subvert or deconstruct something quiet easily available. Where would you localize yourself?

Jetelová: I would not locate myself in this field. The work of description is somewhat very different from that of research. I see myself as researching. I like this a lot, and if I succeed, I am happy in a very special way. It is not often achievable. Moreover, it is not a static experience, but a fluid way of exploring the world, within I enjoy the vastness. Any restriction is unacceptable for me. I am incredibly glad that my job offers that freedom and I am thus capable to continue my research.

Ritter: Thank you for the interview and this very beautiful final word!